The Ghostly and the Ghosted in Literature and Film: Spectral Identities is a collection of essays expanding the concepts of “ghost” and “haunting” beyond literary tools used to add supernatural flavor to include questions of identity, visibility, memory and trauma, and history. Using a wide scope of texts from varying time periods and cultures, including fiction and film, this collection explores the phenomenon of social ghosts. What does it mean, for example, to be invisible, to be a ghost, particularly when that ghost is representative of a person or group living on the margins of society? Why do specific types of ghosts tend to haunt certain cultures and/or places? What is it about a people’s history that invites these types of hauntings? The essays in this book, like pieces of a puzzle, approach the larger questions from diverse individual perspectives, but, taken together, they offer a richly detailed composite discussion of what it means to be haunted.

Lisa Kröger is a freelance writer and teaches academic writing to graduate students at Mississippi State University.

Melanie R. Anderson is an instructional assistant professor of American literature at the University of Mississippi.

IntroductionPart One: The Gothic and the Ghostly Chapter One: Haunted Narratives: Women Writing the Ghostly in Early Gothic Fiction Lisa KrögerChapter Two: City of Ghosts: Elizabeth Bowen’s Wartime StoriesStefania PorcelliChapter Three: Those “whose deaths were not remarked:” Ghostly Other Women in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, and Marilynne Robinson’s HousekeepingJana M. TigchelaarPart Two: Spectral Figures and Spectral HistoriesChapter Four: These Ghosts Will Be Lovers: The “Cultural Haunting” of Class Consciousness in Ian McEwan’s AtonementKarley K. AdneyChapter Five: The Spectral Queerness of White Supremacy in Helen Oyeyemi's White Is for WitchingAmy K. KingChapter Six: In the Spirit of Reconciliation: Migrating Spirits and Australian Postcolonial Multiculturalism in Hoa Pham’s VixenJessica CarnielChapter Seven: Haunting Mothers: Alternative Modes of Communication in Geographies of Home and SoledadBetsy A. SandlinPart Three: Spectral ProjectionsChapter Eight: Aesthetics of Hauntings as Diasporic Sensibility in Julie Dash’s Daughters of the DustYu-yen LiuChapter Nine: Women as Cultural Wound: Korean Horror Cinema and the Imperative of HanAndrew Hock Soon NgChapter Ten: Interrogating Capitalism, The Specter of Hiroshima, and the Architectural Uncanny in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s PulsePaul PetrovicBibliographyAbout the Contributors

Kröger (academic writing, Mississippi State University) and Anderson (American literature, University of Mississippi) ask: what is it about the spectral that has held popular attention for so long? What does it symbolize for authors and audiences? What is a ghost? Existentially ghosts lie between fact and fiction, between the orbits of believer and nonbeliever, and provide bounteous fodder for storytelling, literature, and film. In 10 chapters the editors and their contributors offer a broad, comparative look at the place of ghosts in literature and film, and they see the ghost as a useful metaphor for death and the uncertainties of life. There are three parts: the Gothic and the ghostly; spectral figures and spectral histories; and spectral projections. This concise and interesting book is for scholars and the intellectually curious. — Book News, Inc.